Some books keep you turning pages with suspense. Others keep the pages flipping with their deep character studies. But then there are those books that are just so much damn fun, you can’t do anything but keep reading and laughing out loud. But which science fiction or fantasy book is just the most fun ever?

Tomorrow, Max Brooks' acclaimed novel World War Z becomes a movie... well, sort of. They kept the title. Actually, World War Z is just the latest in a long line of films that depart from the books so much, they're basically a brand new story. Here are 12 science fiction and fantasy movies that toss the book out the…

It's summer movie season, the time when blockbuster films come out every week and we pit Vin Diesel against Wolverine. But how do you keep that cineplex excitement alive when you're at home on the couch? With books! Here are 10 science fiction novels that pack more non-stop thrills than Fast & Furious 6. Really.

Before his death in 2012, science fiction author Harry Harrison granted Repo Man and Sid and Nancy director Alex Cox permission to adapt his satirical novel Bill, the Galactic Hero as a student-made film. Now Cox has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help him, his colleagues, and his students at the University of…

Even starship captains get the blues sometimes. And when you get depressed, or when you're stuck in bed with a nasty case of black plague, you need something to cheer you the frak up. Luckily, there are tons of science fiction and fantasy books with proven restorative properties.

If Harry Harrison had only created "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, the roguish hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books, he would deserve a high place in science fiction history. But he also wrote dozens of other novels, including the hilarious Bill the Galactic Hero saga, the proto-Steampunk classic A Transatlantic Tunnel,…

Science fiction and fantasy are all about reaching beyond the horizon — so it's not surprising that many of the greatest speculative fiction authors have broadened their own horizons. And you can see it in their writing, because the experience of negotiating a very different culture and learning another language…

There's only one thing we know for sure about the future: It'll be weird, and you can't really prepare for it. Just imagine trying to tell someone in 2000 how to prepare for life in 2011. But luckily, there's one surefire way to brace yourself for another round of future shock: by reading a slew of great satires,…

With The Tempest, opening tomorrow, Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren bring a splashy fantasy vibe to the Bard. But science fiction and fantasy have been playing with Shakespeare forever. Here are the greatest Shakespeare homages and cover versions in SF.

We live in an absurd universe. And once you throw in stuff like time travel, fiction can get even sillier than real life. But how can you write speculative fiction that lives up to our ridiculous world, without being dumb?

The Earth existed for four billion or so years before humans showed up and started recording history. Why limit ourselves to the what-ifs of the past few thousands years? In these alternate reality tales, continents and dinosaur empires rise and fall.

LibraryThing's science fiction group had a great discussion about "wrong book, wrong time" situations, where you hate a book, but much later, you rediscover it and fall in love. What books are you glad you gave a second chance to?

Classic science fiction author Harry Harrison says America is becoming a totalitarian state, and praised Russia for its interest in literature, according to an interview published in the Russian newspaper Pravda. The Stainless Steel Rat author, visiting Moscow for a convention, said America violates its own…

The first time I ever read the word "anti-hero," it was in an article about science fiction, and it's always seemed a very science fictional type of word — like anti-matter, or anti-gravity. Science fiction has its share of one-dimensional white hats, but the characters who capture our imagination are usually the…

With the space shuttle program about to be retired, we need a new class of crewed ships for space exploration. But Congress may never cough up the money to build them. Luckily, science fiction teaches us that anything can be a spaceship: an old airplane, a World War II battleship, a fairground ride... or even some…